A Mountain Springs Christmas

Chapter 4

four

NICK

Nick took a bite of the roast beef as he watched his mother-in-law and daughter work on decorating the last few cookies. When he’d told his work that he wanted to move to Mountain Springs, they had been gracious enough to allow him to work from home four days a week. As a software developer, it was a fairly easy job to work remotely.

But they still wanted him to come in one day a week to meet with clients and his team and to coordinate with quality assurance. Those days were the hardest, because his commute was an hour in each direction on a good day, making his work day so much longer. Linda, Ben, and Holly might’ve already eaten when he got back from in-office days, but having a warm meal that he didn’t have to prepare waiting for him when he returned was a luxury that he was going to miss when he and Holly moved into their new home in a few weeks.

“And,” Holly said, dragging out the word, “done!” She held up her most recent masterpiece, which looked like Mrs. Claus with a hand up, waving. Nick was pretty sure that the cookie shape was intended to be a mitten, with Mrs. Claus’s arm as the thumb.

“Nice!” Nick said. “I give this one fifty-seven stars.”

Holly tilted her head. “Out of how many?”

“Fifty.”

She pumped a fist. “Yes! I knew I’d get over on this one!”

As Nick walked over to the sink to rinse his plate, he asked Holly, “Want to go to the new house with me tonight to patch some holes in the walls? We can go on a hunt to find every last spot that needs fixing.”

“You know it,” she said before hopping down from the bar stool she’d been kneeling on. “I’ll go get my stuff.”

Holly was nothing if not a seeker of adventure. Of course, she was in.

Linda watched as Holly skipped out of the room, then turned to Nick. He worried for a moment that his mother-in-law was going to bring up something more about starting to date again, but instead, she said, “That will be good for her. Just so you know, she came home in a mood. The cookie decorating distracted her, but you should probably still ask about it.”

Nick’s attention flew to Linda as his chest tightened. “Do you know why?”

She shook her head. “Something at school. She said she would only tell you, but if I had to guess, something happened with that same boy.”

The new house was only a block away, but he, Holly, and Rosy still drove there. It was very cold, very dark, the sidewalks looked very slippery, and his trunk had more things than they could carry in a single load, including several gallons of primer. Besides, it was a little too chilly for the dog’s paws.

When he opened his trunk, he grinned at Holly. “I know we aren’t planning to decorate for Christmas until we move in, but what do you say we get a head start?” He pulled from its bag the wreath with the bulbs and bells that he’d bought and showed it to Holly.

She took the wreath in her hands, looking at it in awe. Then she ran with Rosy, the dog’s yips of excitement matching Holly’s, and she reached up, standing on her tippy toes, stretching her arms way up, to get it hooked on the nail that was pounded into the wooden door.

The look Holly gave him as she grinned back at where he stood by the trunk and the happiness on Rosy almost erased the bad memories of getting attacked by the blasted things in the store.

Well, maybe not almost . “Partially” was a better word.

Once they had all the supplies carried inside, Holly stood beside him in the family room with her hands on her hips, staring at the wall, just like he was. Except for the tools and supplies that seemed to be multiplying in the home the more days he worked on it, the place was empty and every sound they made echoed off the walls and hardwood floors.

“Okay, what we’re looking for are holes like these.” He stepped up to the wall and ran a finger over a nail hole, then he pulled a putty knife from the tool belt he wore. “To fix it, we just put the corner of this into the Spackle and get a little on. We only need about this much. See? Then we just push it into the hole, like this, and then lay the knife flat to scrape off the extra. Got it?”

Holly nodded, her eyebrows drawn together in serious focus.

“Okay, you try this one.” He moved the step ladder just in front of a second nail hole, then handed her the putty knife. It wasn’t too difficult a task for her, and based on the proud grin she gave him when the hole was no longer, she was going to love what they would be spending the next hour or so doing.

Plus, he figured it might help her get more invested in the new house and claim it as home. He was sure it wasn’t easy for her to leave the home she’d spent her entire life in. He’d grown up not being exposed to home improvement stuff at all, but Clara had. Her parents were quite the DIYers, so when he and Clara had bought their first house, Clara had total confidence in picking up a saw, a hammer, a wrench, a drill, and a million other tools, and he wanted Holly to be exposed to the same thing.

He put a roll of blue painter’s tape on her arm like a bracelet and told her to start filling holes and if she found anything bigger than the tip of a pencil to tear off a piece of the tape and stick it to the wall right by the hole. And then when she was finished, she could start filling the finishing nail holes in the baseboard that he’d installed yesterday.

As Holly filled a second hole that she’d found and he worked on patching a bigger hole beside the fireplace, he asked, “So, what happened at school today?”

The nice thing about Holly was that she was always willing to spill whatever was on her mind, no coaxing needed. All he had to do was open the gate.

She held up one finger as she concentrated on scraping the excess spackle from the wall, then turned around to face him, fists on her hips, getting a dab of white spackle on her pants where the putty knife in her hands bumped up against it.

After opening her mouth to speak, she closed it, then took in a deep breath. “Remember how you’re always saying that it’s important to help people? Especially the ones who really need it?”

He nodded slowly, wondering where this story was going that ended with her being upset.

“Well, I want you to remember that you always say that because I’m about one minute away from asking you to help my school make a living room for our program.” His eyebrows rose, and Holly stayed quiet for about five seconds before saying, “Will you help make a living room for my school?”

“You want me to make you… a living room?”

“Not a real one, Dad! A fake one. With a fireplace with an opening big enough for Santa—a first-grade one— to crawl out of, with stockings hanging on it. Those can be real. And then, I don’t know, a chair and a rug or something.”

“Hollybear, I’m not sure I can—”

“You’ve got all the tools. You can use that saw you’ve been using for the baseboard and that other saw that’s more growly and we can buy paint and I don’t think it’ll be too hard for us.”

“I know. But there’s a lot of work I’ve got to finish on this house so we can get moved in before Christmas.”

“This is important, Dad!” Her face was so full of emotion that it surprised him.

He set down his mud pan and drywall tool then lifted her off the step stool and sat on the plastic drop cloth-covered flooring with her. “Okay, okay. Talk to me about why it’s so important to you that I do it.”

She gazed at the window that didn’t have any blinds or curtains. With as dark as it was outside, all it showed was a reflection of the mostly empty room. Then she met his eyes. “Remember that kid I told you about?”

“The one who said he could make the best paper snowflakes?”

She nodded. “My teacher said she needed parent helpers to make the set for our Christmas program, and I was going to tell her that maybe you could help because you’re fixing up an entire house. But Aiden beat me up there and he said that his mom would be best at it. Can you believe he said that? Like my mom couldn’t do all that when she totally could have!”

“Oh, Holls,” he said and pulled her in for a hug, wrapping his arms around her little shoulders. It couldn’t be easy losing a mom at such a young age.

“So I told him that you’d be better at it than his mom is.” Her words came out muffled against his shoulder.

He pulled back. “Holly.”

“I know. I wasn’t ‘winning friends and influencing people,’ like grandpa Ben always says I should, but please , Daddy. Please make the living room for us. I know it’s not the same as mom doing it, but I have to show Aiden that he was wrong about her. Please?”

Nick wanted to help her. He knew he needed to do more to fill in the gaping holes left by a parent who had passed. And he wanted to do everything he could to help her not be so sad that her mom wasn’t there for all of it. Could he even do this, though? Add one more thing to a long list of things to finish before Christmas?

He could. He could somehow find a way to make it all work and be awesome for his daughter when she needed him to be.

“Okay.”

Holly sat up straighter, her eyebrows raised in hope. “You’ll do it?”

He nodded, and she wrapped her little arms around him in a hug, which made him feel pretty great. He might not be able to give her all he wanted to, but he could give her this.

When she pulled back from the hug, she said, “I miss Mom. Can I video chat with her on your phone?”

He looked at her, confused. Holly understood that her mom was gone.

Then she gestured to the phone at his waist. “You know, the picture you have of Mom on your phone. I’ve seen you talk to Mom on it.”

Heat rose to his cheeks just knowing that his six-year-old caught him talking to a picture. He pulled out the phone. “You know it’s not really her.”

“I know. But it helps, right? It seems like it helps.”

He swiped to the last page of apps and handed the phone to Holly. “I think it does.”

“Hi, Momma,” Holly said while looking at the screenshot, her voice full of emotion that grabbed his heart. “I miss you. We are in our new house, just fixin’ things up. Check it out.” She turned the phone around, so she was basically showing the picture to the walls. “And Dad’s even letting me help search out all the nail holes and fill them. Mom, I’m making them practically disappear!”

She showed the picture of the tool she was using, then she turned the phone back to face her and said, “I know you’re watching over us, and I think you’ll really like watching us in this house. Well, I better get back to work! Love you lots and lots, Momma.”

She pressed the button to turn off the screen, then handed the phone back to Nick and said, “You’re right. It does help.”

Holly went back to her job of filling the nail holes, this time in the baseboard, humming a tune she was probably making up. It amazed him how quickly she could bounce back from such strong emotions.

As they worked, Nick couldn’t seem to get what his in-laws had said out of his mind. Now seemed as good a time as any to bring it up with Holly.

“So,” he said, spreading the last of the joint compound on the hole repair, trying his best to act nonchalant, “your grandparents think I should start dating again. How do you feel about that thought?”

Holly shrugged.

“Come on. You always have an opinion about everything. What’s your opinion about this?”

She was quiet for a moment, tilting her head as she slowly moved the putty knife over the baseboard. Then she turned around to face him. “Mom said you should.”

“She did?” He wondered if Clara had told Holly and her parents to prepare them, just like she had with him, or if she had only gone to them after he’d brushed aside her request like it could never actually happen. Maybe she knew he’d need outside encouragement to someday date again.

Holly nodded. “She said I’d need a mom, even if it couldn’t be her.”

“And how do you feel about someday getting a new mom?”

“I think,” she said, dragging the words out like she was trying to figure out her thoughts as she went, “that she wouldn’t really be my mom, so it would be kind of weird.” She bit her lip for a long moment. “But maybe it would be nice to have someone who is like a mom, you know? Someone else who can love me and help take care of me. It might be weird. But maybe I’d like it.” She pointed the putty knife in his direction. “Only if she’s nice.” She waited another moment before asking, “Would it be weird for you, too?”

Holly wasn’t always perceptive, but when she was, she never shied away from asking the hard questions. Questions he didn’t have the answers to.

“I don’t know, Hollybear. Maybe we’ll just have to figure all this out as we go along.”

He looked down at the gold band still on his ring finger and wondered if it was maybe time to retire it.